Many systems are presently known for the capture and compression of video clips. Typical video capture systems use expensive television decoder chips with phase locked loop circuits to first convert the analog video signal into RGB or YUV formatted digital video data and then send the digital video data to a hard disk or other storage device at between 8 and 24 bits per pixel (bpp). Superior systems use hardware to compress the YUV or RGB data using the discrete cosine transform (DCT), vector quantization, or other methods. These systems require sophisticated and expensive hardware compression integrated circuits (ICs).
Typically, RGB data is sent at 24, 16 or 15 bits per pixel (bpp). YUV data is sent at 16, 12 or 9 bpp. The Palletized RBG data format allows 256 simultaneous colors and is sent at 8 bpp. With hardware compression, the bits per pixel value for good quality images are reduced to 4 and 3 bpp. The estimated image quality for the various formats is: 100% for RGB at 24 bpp and YUV at 16 bpp; 85% for RBG at 16 bpp and YUV at 12 bpp; 75% for RGB at 15 bp; 60% for hardware compression at 3 bpp with JPEG DCT and at 4 bpp with vector quantization; and 50% for Palletized RGB.
Each of these systems requires television decoder chips and sophisticated phase locked loop circuits. None of the systems without hardware compression chips are able to provide high quality compression and high data rates. None of these systems send compressed raw video data directly to an external computer to be stored.